The only factor in the situation that prevents the irredentist movements from being already serious--alarmingly serious--is the agrarian question. Hungary is still under the domination of the land-owning classes, while peasant proprietorship has won its way in Rumania and Jugoslavia and is making progress in Slovakia. Most of the large landowners in the now “unredeemed” lands of Hungary are Hungarian aristocrats; and the peasants, although Magyars, knowing the failure of land partition to make progress in Hungary, are not sure that they would be better off if they returned to their old allegiance. Up to this time the oppression of Hungarians in the liberated states has been confined to landowners and townspeople; and the Hungarian peasants have, in fact, profited by this. The agrarian question, until it is settled by the disappearance of great estates, plays a rôle the importance of which can hardly be overestimated in the newly awakened national rivalries in border-lands from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Poles are confronted, for instance, with an embarrassing dilemma. They want to drive the Germanic influence out of the Baltic states because it is a menace to their ambitions. But German influence in the territories ceded by the Treaty of Versailles to Poland and in the Baltic states is based upon the landed aristocracy, which is the foundation of Polish influence in the Russian border-lands and Eastern Galicia. Advocating agrarian laws helps Poland in some places and acts as a tremendous boomerang in other places! So it is with the encouragement of irredentist movements. If nationalism finds its support largely with the aristocracy, and they have to go to the peasant masses in coveted border-lands to spread their movement, when the “unredeemed” regions are added to the so-called mother-land, the promoters of the irredentist movement are the first to suffer. It has recently happened that way in Rumania. To-day Hungarians, both peasants and proprietors, are wondering which is the more important, national pride or class interest. When we study problems and reconstruction in a topsyturvy world, we find that they are not new problems. They are old problems, couched in different terms, perhaps, and clothed a bit differently. But they are the same problems for all that; is not geography the same, distribution of wealth the same, and human nature the same? CHAPTER XVII AUSTRIA WITHOUT HER PROVINCES